Conflict of Visions: The Birthing of a University

By Joyce M. Kennedy, Ph.D.

This is the story of hope and despair, heartache and triumph, told by an insider who was intimately involved in the quarter-century struggle to establish a state university in Ventura, CA. 
Imagine an unknown woman with no special credentials, and from another country, rallying local citizens, future students, local politicians, the news media, chambers of commerce, and various people of vision, to rise to the call of the past and the promise of the future, and to band together to establish a public university for the greater good. When she started, Joyce M. Kennedy had no idea it would take a Sisyphean struggle in a lovely California city to try to establish a public university.

This is a story that had to be told - a true story of clear-versus-clouded visions, hidden agendas, egos, politics, power struggles, threats of closure, myopia, and the ups and downs of a quarter century struggle. It is a story of heartbreak, but also of ultimate vindication and triumph, the creation of a new university in Camarillo, California—CSU Channel Islands, the fastest growing university in the United States and now a "center of light, liberty and learning" as Disraeli would have described it. Conflict of Visions tells the unvarnished story of its birthing.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joyce M. Kennedy, Ph.D.
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997456288

Book preview

Dedication

Where there is no vision the people perish.

– Proverbs 29:18

This book is dedicated to the memory of those visionaries

who dared to pursue an elusive dream

but didn’t live to see it materialize.

Dr. Julius Gius

Mrs. Dorie Knapp

Dr Maria Maginnis

Dr. John Sugden

Mrs. Rita Von Hoetzendorff

Ms. Barbara R. Walker

Mrs. Janis Wilde

Also, I heard the voice of the Lord, saying,

Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

Then said I, Here am I;

Send me.

And he said;

Go, and tell this people,

Hear ye indeed, but understand not;

And see ye indeed, but perceive not.

ISAIAH 6: 8-9 King James Version.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to several long-suffering friends who encouraged me to continue writing when I had lost interest in doing so, especially during the ordeal of writing the final two chapters and afterword:

…to my long-distance friends and former neighbors, Glenna and George Pappas for unfailing enthusiasm and support;

…to Diane Lewis for perceptive questions that prodded me onward after a two-year bout with writer’s block;

…to Michael Hoffman for his professional guidance, insights and editing;

…to Dr. Joanna Miller for her patience and expertise in unraveling sundry computer glitches and clarifying my convoluted thinking.

…and to my former graduate school classmate Art Newlee, whose timely phone call in the Fall of l982 helped bring me back to the Learning Center.

I am grateful for their faith. Any mistakes are mine alone.

Introduction

By Timm Herdt

¹

In the fall of 2012, the 10th anniversary year for California State University Channel Islands, I had the privilege to participate in a panel discussion that was part of a two-day conference featuring several of the nation’s most eminent political scholars.

Looking out into the audience in the Grand Salon that day, I swear I briefly saw Joyce Kennedy. At that moment I was thrilled. Here in her beloved, adop-ted Ventura County, at a thriving public university, students and scholars were engaged in thoughtful discussion of the challenges facing 21st century American democracy. Surely this was just the sort of vision that had sustained Dr. Kennedy for so long. How marvelous that she should witness it.

Alas, it could not have been her that I saw.

Dr. Kennedy, as is the fate of birth mothers of most adopted humans and institutions, would be an awkward and perhaps even unwelcome presence on the campus that she brought to life through a quarter century of enduring what were at times unimaginable struggles.

It took her two decades to develop public higher education in Ventura County from a couple of small classrooms in a midtown Ventura office building to a stage of viability that made the creation of an independent, university possible.

As a journalist, I reported on the saga whose beginning roughly coincided with the launch of my professional career at the Ventura County Star (and its predecessor, the Star-Free Press). For much of that long period of birthing a university, I not only chronicled the progress but also crusaded for its establishment as editor of the Star’s editorial page.

Reading Dr. Kennedy’s memoir, Conflict of Visions, I realize now that her perseverance was even more profound than I had ever imagined. She overcame incompetence and indifference from university administrators, endured disrespect and a lack of appreciation, patched together academic programs on shoestring budgets and the good will of a generous few. Through it all, she never lost sight of what, to her, was a clear and unambiguous goal: to expand educational opportunity for the citizens of Ventura County.

In this book, she recounts her first day on the job at the Ventura Learning Center and how she was confused about what her mission was to be. She writes that she was told her job was to keep it full. And that was what Joyce, through all her struggles and disappointments, managed to do. Enrollment grew and grew, even during times of economic downturns and state budget cutbacks to higher education.

Through her inspired leadership, managerial expertise and gentle skill of persuasion, Dr. Kennedy was able to provide degree-granting programs to more students at less cost than any comparable program in California. There was never a moment, even when political forces might have tempted California State University officials to walk away from Ventura County, that they could responsibly consider that option. The reason was that Joyce, year after year, kept proving there was a strong and growing demand in the county for public higher education.

There was only one academic year in which enrollment declined from the time the Learning Center was established in 1974 until the stand-alone campus was established in 2002. That was in 1982, the year Dr. Kennedy was passed over for the directorship and subsequently resigned. By the following February she was rehired and given permanent director status. Enrollment began to climb again after that and never stopped.

Even today CSU Channel Islands is the fastest growing college campus in America.

The campus was established just before state revenues collapsed in the aftermath of the dot.com crash. California’s fiscal situation has never fully recovered. CSU Channel Islands got in just under the wire. No new campus has been established since, and given Gov. Jerry Brown’s push for greater efficiency in higher education, it is unlikely that any new public universities are in California’s new-term future.

Make no mistake: The story of the creation of Cal State Channel Islands is a success story, and the tale that Dr. Kennedy recounts in this book has a happy ending.

But there is a decidedly bittersweet quality to Dr. Kennedy’s memoir. As she writes at one point, I still wonder, as I did then, why there had to be so much unmitigated grief in my attempt to do what was so obviously right for the community and for so many people hungering for knowledge.

It is sad, closer to tragic that Dr. Kennedy, her health worn down by years of tireless struggle and finding herself cast aside by the administrators who became the new university’s adopted parents, never got to share fully in the joy of her creation. As she writes here, as the actual creation of the university approached, it was for her time to fade into the sunset.

There is a lesson in this book for all college administrators, who too frequently become consumed by the petty politics and distractions of academia — fights over tenure, squabbles over turf and the like. The lesson is that they must never lose sight of what matters most: the essential importance of their institutions to the community around them and to the world at large.

And there is a lesson here also for the administrators, faculty, staff, students and the growing number of alumni of California State University Channel Islands. The university that they understandably take for granted did not spring from some deep-pocketed benefactor, or a visionary elected official. It was the product of grit, tenacity and suffering. Its birth was preceded by an unimaginably difficult and nearly interminable labor.

There may have been conflicts of vision along the way, but the vision of Dr. Joyce Kennedy was always crystal clear. She wanted a public university for Ventura County. Without her clarity of vision, it would never have happened.

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1. Timm Herdt wrote this forward while serving as the Sacramento bureau chief for the Ventura County Star. Herdt has since retired.

Preface

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.

– Robert Burns

The struggle for a public, four-year university in Ventura County, Calif., was long, arduous, and, at times, heart-breaking. For those who experienced the drama up close, it sometimes rose to the level of maddening despair. There were many times when the endeavor appeared on the verge of failure. There were times of euphoria when some small battle was won. More often than not, there were uncertain times when no one knew what the morrow would bring.

This is the story – based on my personal experience and perspective – of the quarter-century struggle that ended with the establishment of the 23rd campus in the California State University system – California State University Channel Islands.

Because I was intimately involved in what was to become a long love affair, I thought it might be useful to record what I remember. Although there were some stormy relationships with various people and institutions over the years, it should be known that there were no rogues nor scoundrels in the long struggle, but, rather, decent people with different opinions, goals and agendas. I hope the reader will forgive any errors, oversights, omissions or failings. I have endeavored to back up any claims (some are outlandish) or observations with documents or sources.

Many years ago, Disneyland categorized its rides by the letters A, B, C, and so on, depending on the level of risk and excitement of the specific ride. Its biggest and best (and most expensive) were the E rides. That’s what our experience was in launching the Ventura Learning Center, the precursor to the longed-for public university. Its highs and lows, twists and turns, despair and euphoria came almost daily.

But it was the love of my life. And, for nearly a quarter of a century, it was a glorious ride.

If you’d like to share the ride, read on.

1

Back to California

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

– Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken, 1916 

The odyssey began unceremoniously.

I was on a Greyhound bus on a warm August night in 1974, heading northeastward from California to Montana and Canada. As the bus rolled through the night, its lights bisecting the darkness, I couldn’t sleep and instead listened to my little transistor radio, propped precariously against the bus window. We were somewhere in Nevada.

These were momentous times, I thought. There was breaking news to the effect that Richard Nixon was about to resign as President of the United States. I was not sorry to see him go – not that I’d be in the United States much longer. Incredibly, I was ineligible to remain. The Department of Justice in Los Angeles had just taken away my Green Card and with it, my ability to work in the United States. The job I had accepted only days before had, therefore, evaporated.

The reason for revocation? I had qualified for (and gained) residency in the U.S. back in 1965 when I accepted a job with the Easter Seal Society in Montana. But I had returned to Canada in late 1970 after my father died, to help care for my mother who had suffered a debilitating stroke. I had thought I could return to the States at will, because I had paid my income and property taxes, and had settled all accounts before leaving. Not so! When I went to the Immigration Office in Los Angeles to update my address, an agent seized my Green Card. I was suddenly and unexpectedly a persona non grata.

The loss had been a mind-boggling blow. I had to leave the country! And since I wasn’t overly endowed with money, I decided to make the best of it and see the country up close and cheaply, by bus. My first stop would be Great Falls, Montana, where I had spent several mostly delightful years, first with the RCAF at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and later with the Montana Easter Seal Society.¹ I’d touch base with some old friends before continuing on my journey.

And that’s why I was on a Greyhound bus rumbling through the night in August 1974. I was heading home, jobless, to Canada.

§

I wasn’t long in Great Falls before California friends tracked me down. They had spoken to an immigration lawyer who thought that, given the special circumstances under which I left the country, and the fact that I still qualified for residency, my Green Card should not have been taken from me. Would I come back to fight for it?

I was ambivalent, for several reasons. First there was my handicapped mother back in Canada to consider. Moreover, I hadn’t much money to pay for a lawyer. Further, the job I had been offered was now filled by someone else. But my friends persisted and to make a long story short, I made a mental and physical U-turn and returned to California – and hired the lawyer. He won the appeal. With enormous relief I tucked the Green Card into a deep pocket of my wallet. But there still remained a couple of problems.

Optimists say that when one door closes, another opens. That’s essentially what happened to me. With my Bachelor of Journalism degree and a modest classical background in English, History and Latin, I had always been fortunate to work for non-profit organizations that I admired – an Anglican missionary school in Regina where I taught High School English, History and Latin; the Royal Canadian Air Force; the Montana Easter Seal Society; and the Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded. Now I was about to open a new door to another public service role and embark on a long- term love affair.

I just didn’t know it at the time.

§

A former colleague of mine, Barbara Walker, asked if I’d be interested in short-term consultant work in Ventura, California. It would be for two months only. It paid $8.00 an hour. There were no benefits. The hours were varied. Including evening hours and some Saturdays.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, I thought happily. That would give me breathing time to hunt for another job, and I could send for my mother. I accepted with alacrity.

The job sounded interesting enough, though not well defined. Apparently there was some kind of new Learning Center to be opened in the coastal city of Ventura. It was to be co-sponsored by the University of California and the California State University systemwide offices.² They would bring upper division and graduate level courses to an off-campus site in Ventura to enable working adults to earn a bona fide university degree on a part-time basis. (Ventura County had no public four-year university within its borders and UC Santa Barbara and CSU Northridge were roughly 45 and 55 miles away.)

My job would be – apparently – to help launch and publicize the new center. There were other unspecified responsibilities as well, nicely falling under the famous (and nebulous) catch-all phrase and other duties as required. What with an initial staff of only three people – the Director, an as-yet-to-be-hired Administrative Assistant, and myself, the so-called consultant – other duties would entail unexpected and sometimes daunting challenges.

Indeed, some challenges and opportunities would prove unimaginable!

But before looking at them, it would be useful to take a backward glance at the constellation of factors that brought the Ventura Learning Center into existence.

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1. I say mostly delightful because I ended up fighting for my life there after a disastrous skiing accident in December 1963 – but that’s another story.

2. The CSU system was then known as the California State University and Colleges (CSUC). The system later dropped the last two words and became CSU.

2

A Bit of Background

Promote then, as an object of primary importance,

institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion

as the structure of government gives force to public opinion,

it is essential that public opinion be enlightened.

– From George Washington’s Farewell Address,

published on 19 September 1796

While many people in Ventura County had longed for a public university for some time it was simply not in the cards in the early 1970s.¹ The population wasn’t large enough to warrant (or support) one. Nor was state financing available, in spite of the fact that Cal State had purchased 428 acres of land near Somis in the mid Sixties for a future campus. University-bound students therefore had to travel beyond the county borders for a university degree from a public university. However, the county was not without access to higher education.

There were two fine community (then called Junior) colleges, Ventura and Moorpark, offering lower division courses and two-year Associate degrees in the county. Private universities also served some segments of the community well. California Lutheran College (now University) was a respected liberal arts school located in Thousand Oaks. La Verne College (later University), the University of Southern California (U.S.C.), and Pepperdine College (later University) also offered a limited number of programs in the community as did two colleges of law (Ventura and Glendale). There was, however, something of a vacuum in terms of public higher education beyond the community college level.

UCSB, from its base in Goleta just north of Santa Barbara, had begun offering some degree programs through its Extended University in 1972 (first a Bachelor’s degree in Law and Society at the Oxnard Air Force Base and later Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Urban Economics).

But these UCSB programs, like those of the private universities, required self-support fees. They were not tax-subsidized. This fact, plus the usual on-campus requirement of full-time studies and the limited number of offerings in Ventura County left an underserved group, many of whom were tax-paying adults in the work force, unable to return to school. Most high school graduates seeking a university degree from a public university simply had to leave the county. It would appear then that Ventura County, with a population of nearly half-a-million people, was ripe for some form of public education opportunities.

But it was really not the under-served population – or altruistic motives – that brought about the Ventura Center – though that argument would be used later. Other factors – including state-wide issues – were at work.²

In the early 1970s, a multitude of studies – some by educational institutions and some by futurists and others – chronicled the need for more and alternative access to public higher education in a rapidly changing society. Without delving into too much history, I believe it would be useful to cite some representative studies.

One report of significance to Ventura County was written by Warren Bryan Martin. He criticized colleges and universities for their segmental thinking (a euphemism for protecting their own turf) by using the argument of the danger of lowered standards. He said alternatives to building new campuses must be found.³

Other studies sounded somewhat similar themes:

The Academy for Educational Development in Palo Alto, prepared a report on inter-institutional cooperation which expressed concern about duplication and unproductive competition.⁴

The Siroky Report suggested that external degree programs should not necessarily follow the traditional on-campus programs, either in mode of instruction, time or content.⁵

A policy paper by Michael Scriven, though not specifying off-campus programs, noted the cost factors that precluded potential students from access to higher education.⁶

It can be readily seen that by 1973, the state of California was seriously addressing the access problem.

And in September 1973 another far-reaching report would emerge.

Years before, in 1960, with laudable insight and foresight, California had developed its long-range Master Plan for Higher Education.⁷ It articulated the differentiated functions of the three segments (or tiers) of public higher education – the community colleges which offered the first two years of college and Associate degrees; the CSU system, which offered access to the top third of graduating high school students; and the University of California which would serve the top 12.5 percent of high school grads, (and which had the exclusive responsibility of offering doctoral and professional degrees).

But now, as demonstrated by many studies, there were still gaps, redundancies and access problems. Many studies and reports had pointed out the growing need for alternatives to full-time, campus-based studies.

Thus, in September 1973, the California Legislature published a major document entitled Report of the Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education. Of significance, it included a chapter on alternative delivery systems and off-campus learning.

(Alternatives included methods of learning other than by having students attend classes on campus, full-time, usually during the day.)

The Report rang some worrisome alarm bells for California’s three segments. It not only criticized the entire educational system for its lack of intersegmental coordination and its lack of off-campus programs, but recommended a whole new (fourth) segment to plan and deliver off-campus programs, encourage a greater diversity of curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation, and utilize resources more efficiently through cooperation and coordination.⁸

Horrors! This would mean splitting the higher education budget pie into yet another piece. It also meant competing for students and for political clout. (Some also suspected it was a way of eliminating the tenured faculty system.) And all this in the middle of a recession.

The UC, CSU and Community Colleges took the report seriously and swung into action, believing they could indeed work together and meet the needs of off-campus students. Meetings were scheduled, committees were formed, plans were presented, and budgets pencilled and inked. More specifically, high-ranking officials from the three segments (including the local Chancellor of the Ventura County Community College District) began discussions to operate